Tuesday, April 04, 2017

Film-maker travels from Brooklyn to Beirut

Lebanese-born Rabbi Elie Abadie holding a family photo (Stepfeed)

Stand by for a new film about the Jews of Lebanon. Rola Khayyat's 'From Brooklyn to Beirut', here described by Nadine Mazloum in Stepfeed, tells how discovering a Syrian/Lebanese community in New York inspired her to make a film about the Jews of Lebanon. It seems that Rola is following in the footsteps of Nadia Abdelsamad, who made a BBC documentary about the Jews of Wadi Jamil, the Beirut Jewish quarter.

We really don't know much about Lebanon's Jewish community.
For
many, "Lebanese Jewish" is too remote a concept. But, the truth is,
Jews in Lebanon once lived side by side with the country's Christian and
Muslim populations. They even share a minorities' seat in parliament.

Beirut's
Wadi Abu Jmil, Saida, Hasbaya and Tripoli were places they once called
home, and Christmas and Eid were occasions to celebrate with neighbors.
They even had several Synagogues where they would hold prayers every
Saturday, one of which is in the Wadi Abu Jmil area – later known as
Beirut's Jewish quarter.
At its zenith, the Jewish
population in Lebanon reached 15,000 in the early 50s, but now they're
estimated to be at less than 100. Many left at the onset of the Lebanese
civil war, and many left for Brooklyn in the U.S. (This is a common myth - most left after the 1967 war -ed)

Their stories
have disappeared from our collective consciousness, but with the effort
of Rola Khayyat – a Columbia University graduate and visual artist based
in New York – we may learn more about this community.

Her first
documentary, "From Brooklyn to Beirut," sheds light on the Lebanese
Jewish diaspora of Brooklyn. It features interviews with members of the
Lebanese Jewish community who returned to Beirut as part of a journey to
rediscover a place they once called home.

StepFeed spoke with
Khayyat to learn more about the film, the community and her
interviewees: Rabbi Elie Abadie and Raymond Sasson.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)